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Archive for June, 2016

Feminist Coffee Hour Episode 11: Rev Hope Johnson, Juneteenth, The Living Legacy Project

Posted in Podcast Episodes on June 16th, 2016
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Episode Eleven: Rev Hope Johnson, Juneteenth, The Living Legacy Project

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Discussed in this episode:

Make Juneteenth A National Holiday

NYT: Housing Bias Outlasts Ruling in a Long Island Village

The Living Legacy Project

“Lessons from Selma” (Video) Rob Eller-Isaacs and Rev Hope Johnson

The Divided Methodist Church

‘Black Lives Matter’ signs stolen off church lawn in Hartford

How the Children Feel When Their Church is Wounded

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About those “jokes” comparing Hillary Clinton to Dolores Umbridge or Winn Adami…or Tracy Flick

Posted in Editorials on June 14th, 2016
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People I know and respect along with a ton of people I don’t know have latched on to the meme that Hillary Clinton is Dolores Umbridge, the sickeningly sweet teacher at Hogwarts who tortures Harry, is useless as a Defense Against The Dark Arts Teacher (though weren’t they all) and has a generally fascistic worldview.

I mean, I guess? Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act and she views Edward Snowden as a criminal more than a whistleblower. That’s kinda fascist. But she’s also solidly against torture, said that we should screen and accept Syrian refugees and is making one of the themes of her campaign “Love Trumps Hate.” So, maybe?

What bothers me the most about this comparison though is how things end for Umbridge. Did you forget that part? I’m almost positive most people have, especially when making this comparison. She’s raped by centaurs. And it’s supposed to be funny. When she comes back to Hogwarts, she’s in shock, and our heroes know what happened. Ron makes clopping hoof noises to scare her (trigger her?) and Hermione and Ginny crack up. Granted, they’re teenagers, and they have bad judgement. But no one in authority tells them “Hey buzz off, that’s not funny.”

Similarly, though even more geeky and less widespread I see Trekkies making “Hillary Clinton is Winn Adami” jokes. On Deep Space Nine, Winn Adami, played by the amazingly badass Louise Fletcher, was one of the best villans in the history of Star Trek. She’s a religious cleric with both fascistic and theocratic tendencies (although on her home planet of Bajor it’s pretty accepted that the religious leadership shares power with the elected government). She’s a master at manipulating people’s fears to get what she wants no matter the consequences. Like Umbridge, she’s uses sickeningly sweet faux coquettishness to mask her true intentions. Unlike Umbridge, as the writers reveal the complexity of her character, we are meant to empathize with her as a person while still despising her actions. Her crisis of faith is relatable to so many people who have searched for truth.

Is Hillary Clinton like Winn Adami? They’re both blonde and religious and ambitious. I suppose you could draw it out further by bringing up Clinton’s connections to The Family. But that’s still a bit of a stretch.

And yet, like Umbridge, in the end Winn Adami is also raped. Deep Space Nine draws out a more complex story than Order of the Phoenix. Winn is seduced and deceived by her greatest enemy and she is sexually, emotionally and spiritually exploited. The storyline is fascinating one, with an unsettling trainwreck quality that still viscerally disturbs me.

I know that most people making the “Hillary is Umbridge” or “Hillary is Winn” jokes don’t really mean that they think Hillary Clinton should be raped by centaurs or a sociopath in disguise as punishment for her more imperialistic tendencies. I’m not immune to this myself. I love Tom Perrotta novels and when I saw people comparing Hillary Clinton to Tracy Flick I saw it as a backhanded compliment. Tracy Flick kicks ass. She’s super smart and accomplished and wins in the end.

Then I remembered that most of the plot of “Election” is driven by the fact that Tracy is seduced (statutorily raped) by her Math teacher, Dave. Tracy is smarter than most of her peers but she is far behind them in terms of social skills. She has no real friends. This makes her an exceptionally easy target to be groomed and taken advantage of by a much older authority figure. Dave’s actions set off a chain of events which Tracy’s teacher Jim blames her for on some level. In a moment of frustration Jim threatens to ruin Tracy’s reputation by telling the whole student body what happened to her. Tracy takes this in stride because she has a very thick skin, but it’s hard to watch her be manipulated and then blamed and threatened for it.

So perhaps this isn’t the best comparison either.

This is one of those things that once seen, cannot be unseen. So keep that in mind. If you keep making those clever memes, I’m going to keep rolling my eyes and thinking “Ugh. Raped by Centaurs. Really?”

On Having Conditional White Privilege During The Trump Campaign

Posted in Editorials on June 13th, 2016
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Last week Ralph Nader said in an interview about the popularity of Donald Trump:

There were Negro-joke books, Jewish-joke books, Polish-joke books, Italian-joke books. They used ethnic jokes to reduce tension in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s. And they’d laugh at each other’s jokes and hurl another one. But it still flows through ethnic America, you know. There are hundreds of things that people would like to say. So here’s this guy — he doubles down on them, he blows their minds. So that’s the first way he got their attention.

And I wanted to ask him, “Don’t you know white privilege is conditional?” Nader is Lebanese and in the United States many people would not consider him white if they knew that.

I have personal experience with this, I have discussed my mixed ethnicity on this blog. Many people who have conditional white privilege – Jews, light skinned Latinos, Arabs and other POC who pass as white – will have a moment in a conversation with a white person where some detail about their heritage is made known and something shifts in the white person’s tone or body language and you know they’ve just recategorized you in their head. I know Ralph Nader has had this moment, and it’s why I find his statement inexcusable.

Recently I got called out for something I did with my white privilege. In my post about why there is no progressive case for Donald Trump, I said:

For Latinos, Muslims, and many other Americans, Donald Trump is that bear trap and the vote for Hillary Clinton is the gnawing off of one’s leg.

Nezua and I had the following exchange:

I think it’s true that white people should not speak over or for people of color. There is a fine line between being an ally and taking up space that should be reserved for someone else. I also think that if you have privilege you should call out oppression and hatred where you see it, not to talk over or for other people but because it’s the morally right thing to do.

I don’t expect Nezua to intuit my heritage, and even if he knew that my father is a Colombian immigrant, his point would still stand as I do benefit from white privilege and I am not Mexican.

The reasons that I feel the need to call out Trump’s racism are both moral and personal.

I believe strongly that I should consider how my vote impacts everyone, not just myself.

I think that Trump’s comments, while specifically anti-Mexican encourage hatred against all Latinos including my family and possibly myself.

Finally, there is an ugly strain of “they’re coming for our women” underlying Trump’s remarks. Through a series of inadvisable clicks I spent a good portion of a recent afternoon reading through an infamous misogynist blog which has become a pro-Trump White Nationalist hellhole. And I read a lot of comments. Many Trump supporters are insecure men obsessed with their fear white women having sex with and bearing children with men of color. As the daughter of a white American mother and a Latino immigrant father, it was deeply unsettling to read these comments. I am a person who, in their mind should not exist. I am a mistake, an abomination, the worst outcome their fevered imaginations can muster. I am “White Genocide.” My mother is a ruined woman and my father is pure evil depravity. These are the people who filled the rallies for Donald Trump, the people who voted for him in Republican primaries, and who will vote for him in November. This is what they think of me.

I do not ever want to speak over or for groups I do not belong to. I only want to speak for myself. In my words and actions, believe I am morally obligated to consider how I impact other people from other groups.

Why Some Of The Most Spiteful Progressives I Know Won’t Bother To Fact Check Articles Bashing Hillary Clinton

Posted in Editorials on June 10th, 2016
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Silly season continues and it seems we are going through the news cycle of whiny privileged crybabies who claim to be on the left, but also somehow think that Donald Trump will be a better president than Hillary Clinton. I voted for Bernie Sanders, mostly because I wanted to send a signal to Hillary Clinton that many of her policies are unacceptable to me – her vote on the Iraq War and wishy washy-ness on the TPP and Keystone XL pipeline. It would have been pretty amazing if Sanders had won the nomination, but as history shows us, it’s extremely difficult to win a primary against the candidate backed by the party and this year was no exception to that rule.

There are many things I do like about Hillary Clinton, her intelligence, the respect she has garnered around the world and her tenacity. I voted for her in 2008 because I thought she would be tougher against the Republicans than Obama would. She has many flaws, which we detailed in our podcast episode about the primary, but I still think she would be a solid president.

A Politico article by Yves Smith caught my eye today. It’s titled: “Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary.” And it posits that progressives should vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. The article is poorly sourced and doesn’t seem to have been fact checked. It amounts to a temper tantrum over Bernie Sanders not winning the primary. This isn’t just taking your ball and going home, it’s taking your ball and destroying the country in a mushroom cloud of entitled spiteful vengeance.

Smith quotes one of her commenters on her blog Naked Capitalism,

I don’t want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. … If the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it.

This is an odd framing of the election. For Latinos, Muslims, and many other Americans, Donald Trump is that bear trap and the vote for Hillary Clinton is the gnawing off of one’s leg. I would say voting for Trump is like staying in the trap and dying of gangrene or lighting yourself on fire.

The Sanders supporters I interact with also reject Hillary’s trickle-down feminism as a substitute for economic and social justice. Clinton is correct when she points out that there is a glass-ceiling issue for women. There are fewer female CEOs, billionaires and senators. Women in the elite don’t have it as good as men. But pray tell, what is having more women, or Hispanics or blacks, in top roles going to do for nurses and hospital orderlies, or the minority group members disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs like part-time fast food workers? Class mobility has become close to nonexistent in America. If you are born in one of the lower-income cohorts, you are almost certain to stay there.

I would agree in part that much of what passes for feminism these days has no room for women of color or poor women. But I do not see that when I look at Hillary Clinton’s platform. How are paid maternity leave and universal pre-K “trickle down feminism?” These programs would be a great benefit to all mothers. (And children. And fathers.)

Then there are questions of competence. Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role.

Has it ever occurred to Smith that part of the reason Clinton failed was systemic sexism? People were shocked and outraged that she was taking on any official role in her husband’s administration. They called it unprecedented nepotism. But in reality, going back to our second President, John Adams, most Presidents of the United States have relied on the wives for advice and counsel. Formalizing the role was too much for us to handle in 1993, but that doesn’t mean that First Ladies were not doing lots of work for their husbands. Letting this work remain invisible is a sad consequence of patriarchy.

As New York senator, she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state than Sanders did.

The article cited fails to recognize Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments getting aid for 9/11 first responders detailed here. People fighting for the expansion of the Zadroga Act list her as an important ally in the fight to help responders and survivors of 9/11.

As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria.

Equating our involvement in Syria with our invasion of Iraq is entirely disingenuous. I am and will always be morally outraged at the Iraq War. But Syria was already broken when we got there. Equivocating the two is disingenuous and minimizes the harm we did in Iraq.

She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he has called the worst decision of his administration.

This is false. President Obama did not say our intervention in Libya was the worst mistake of his presidency. He said his worst decision was failing to plan for the aftermath of the intervention.

And her plan to fob her domestic economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can’t handle being president on her own.

HILLARY CLINTON’S PLAN TO HAVE ADVISORS MEANS SHE CAN’T HANDLE BEING PRESIDENT? Perhaps Smith should change the name of her website to “Naked Sexism.”

Finally, there is the stench of corruption, dating back to Hillary’s impossible—by any legitimate means—trick of parlaying $1,000 into $100,000 in a series of commodities trades in 1978.

This makes it sound like she was directly involved in these trades. She was not. At worst, she employed a corrupt investor. But no investigation has ever taken place, surprising given the fact that she was investigated for Whitewater, a deal she lost money on. This Wikipedia article details what we know about this scandal and there is no conclusive evidence that Hillary Clinton herself did anything wrong. This attack is especially distasteful given that there is no comparison with Donald Trump’s involvement with the mafia in Atlantic City or his failure to pay people for their work worth a lot more than $100K.

They are willing to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn’t get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.

If Donald Trump gets elected President, he will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will impact the United States for a lot longer than 20 years. In a recent debate, Sam Seder was taking on a “Bernie or Bust” advocate and had the following exchange which I feel sums up the matter:

Jimmy: You know you got that Supreme Court, that is such a little poker in my eye!

Sam: Well, believe me, it’s not just a poker in your eye, it’s a poker in the eye of all those people who can’t vote this year by getting rid of preclearance, it’s a poker in the eye of all the families of the dreamers who keep getting deported, it’s a poker in the eye of people who want to have redress in the courts from things like forced arbitration, it’s a poker in the eyes of women in states who are denied access to abortion care. This thing is bigger than a poker. It’s like a cannon to the face.

There is no progressive case to be made for a racist charlatan like Donald Trump. Anyone who tries to convince you of such is selling spite and desperately trying to hide a bruised ego.